Initiative Overview

Healthy ecosystems sustain life—from providing food and clean water to supplying medicines and raw materials. Humans influence the health and vitality of virtually every ecosystem on the planet. If managed well, ecosystems are resilient and people can continue to rely on them for generations to come. However, managing ecosystems effectively means understanding the stress caused by human activity and finding ways to mitigate that stress.

The Marine Conservation Initiative believes that the two largest, yet most solvable, threats to the oceans are overfishing (including bycatch and discards of unwanted catch) and habitat alteration (including coastal development, damaging resource extraction, and aquaculture). Through science, strategic communications, and policy reform, the Initiative works to improve ocean management and reach our goal of productive, healthy marine ecosystems today and for future generations.

Launched in July 2005, the Initiative supports two primary strategies in three places: British Columbia, the California Current and New England. The Initiative selected these geographies for their significant ecosystem services, momentum among key stakeholders to pursue innovative solutions, and potential to serve as models for sustainable ocean management. Area-based management (ABM) and fisheries management reform are the Initiative’s primary strategies for change. The Initiative seeks to implement ABM that can reduce conflict and promote conservation by specifying the most appropriate uses for particular marine areas. To reform fisheries management, the Initiative funds projects to align economic and social incentives with conservation and promote the establishment of scientifically-sound and ecosystem-based catch limits. 

For more details on the Initiative’s strategies and Theory of Change, see the Strategies page.

Background

There are many reasons why the oceans are in trouble, with humans often at the core. Humans compete for the ocean’s resources through activities like commercial and recreational fishing, oil extraction, tourism, and shipping. These activities, along with continuing pollution, growing levels of acidity, and warming climates, are drastically altering the dynamics and functioning of ocean ecosystems.

The traditional approach to marine resource management has not taken ecosystems and the value of their services into full consideration. Rather, approaches have been reactive, focused on short-term planning, and based upon a patchwork of fragmented management. This non-holistic approach has produced confusing, uncoordinated, and conflicting resource use. In addition, environmental, economic, and social goals have rarely been integrated in a single framework of ocean resource management. Without an integrated approach, unsustainable resource use continues and ecosystem health further declines.

Geographies

In British Columbia, funding focuses primarily on advancing integrated oceans management. At a regional scale, the Initiative supports advancing the Pacific North Coast Integrated Management Area (PNCIMA) planning process, and, at a local scale, the PNCIMA First Nations planning processes and the West Coast Vancouver Island planning process. Grantmaking also supports research into ecosystem impacts of different fishing gears, appropriate zoning of fisheries, and projects like community license banks that mitigate the social and economic impacts of Dedicated Access Privilege.

In the California Current, the Initiative concentrates on fisheries managed by the Pacific Fishery Management Council off the Oregon, Washington, and California coasts. Given the economic and ecological importance of the Pacific Groundfish fishery, the Initiative has focused its grantmaking on implementing an Individual Transferable Quota system for the trawl sector and other sectors of the fishery. The Initiative supports efforts within California state waters (0-3 miles offshore) to move beyond a network of marine protected areas towards comprehensive spatial planning of all major uses.

In New England, fisheries work targets the region encompassed by the New England Fishery Management Council off the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Work here includes reducing overfishing through area-based quotas, sector-based quotas, and Individual Transferable Quotas in key federal fisheries, as well as supporting innovations in fishery monitoring to enable a transition in the way fisheries are managed here. Funding also supports ABM projects in the state waters of Massachusetts, which is poised to be the first in the nation with a comprehensive plan for their coastal ocean by the end of 2009.